Psychotherapy and Artificial Intelligence: A Proposal for Alignment

Abstract

Brief Psychotherapy assists patients to become aware and change their behavior when facing an immediate emotional conflict, and to implement a transformation process through actions of listening, observing, increasing awareness and making interventions. Therapeutic work employs tools and techniques to trigger a process of change, emphasizing cognitive and affective understanding. This article presents an approach that combines Psychology and Artificial Intelligence with the purpose of enhancing psychotherapy with computer-implemented tools. This approach highlights the intersection between these two knowledge areas and shows how machine intelligence can help to characterize affective areas, construct genograms, determine degree of differentiation of self, investigate cognitive interaction patterns, and achieve self-awareness and redefinition. The conceptual proposal was implemented by a web application, and a sample of computer-aided analysis is presented.

Decision Maker Profiling Using Their Mental Behavior Pattern

“…A change in the behavior of an individual, or of a member of the group, affects others at the same time and is affected by similar changes. This format of interaction is called the mental functioning pattern (Mello and Souza, 2019 ), which seeks to investigate, map, and understand the meaning attributed by a person when experiencing various episodes, facts, or events during the various phases of his/her life cycle. These events contribute to the construction of historical baggage of individuals used in interactions with family, friends, and in other relational contexts in which they are inserted.…”

“…Such indicators can be merged according to the ultimate purpose of profile identification, including the expected behavioral pattern for a person who performs a decision-making process. The psychological analysis follows the concept of the mental functioning pattern (Mello and Souza, 2019 ), while the technique of classification into profiles is adjusted by unsupervised machine learning.…”

Machine Learning based Psychology: Advocating for A Data-Driven Approach

“…Interestingly, the combination unsupervised ML techniques may lead to the identification of individuals exhibiting differential clinical profiles (i.e., extreme phenotypes; Acosta et al, 2011;Arcos-Burgos et al, 2019;Elia et al, 2009;Pérez-Gracia et al, 2010;Vidal et al, 2020;Yu et al, 2017;Yu et al, 2018), hence contributing to the development of personalized interventions, treatments, and follow-up strategies. The combination of supervised and unsupervised ML techniques as well as the automation of the data analysis process could allow the development of data-driven Intelligent Systems supporting psychologists to make more accurate and timely decisions (de Mello & de Souza, 2019;Luxton, 2016).…”

An Overview of Artificial Intelligence Applications and Psychology

“…The expert systems application in speech therapy can further enhance its use. Researchers hope that in the light of this improved fuzzy, an expert system can also be applied in providing at-home treatment of the patient [25]. Different AI techniques are used in general psychiatry.…”

“…The systemic-linking method is a step forward in the application of computational intelligence as an auxiliary tool in evaluating the behavioral pattern of couples, families, and individuals. Among the numerous strategies of AI, first-order logic, automatic theorem prover, and fuzzy logic can be used to match the associated psychotherapy interventions linked to the characterization of essential areas, genogram creation, self-determination assessment, cognitive interaction pattern testing, improved self-awareness, and modifications [24,25]. Despite these developments, the opinion that AI investigations have not yet evolved as a universal method for sophisticated formulation of problems needs not to be overlooked [26].…”